@bruhbeans
@lemmy.mlI've used (and do use) a lot of different things. One of my bikes has a front basket which is very helpful. I have a pair of large panniers that clip on a rack on each side and a smaller one that folds over the top of the rack. I have a long-tail cargo bike which is amazing, it's got almost as much space as a USA shopping cart. I have used a trailer, mostly for pulling kids but they work well for cargo and usually clip on and off quickly and some fold up flat for storage. The long-tail cargo bike is the least appealing if you don't have somewhere at street level to store it, but I think it's the best option if you do.
You said you're on Arch, you'll want to go through their docs which are solid: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_entire_system
How old are we talking? If the CPU is >10 years old and/or some kind of ARM, it may not have hardware encryption acceleration, which means it'll happen in software. I did that once, it was horrible. lscpu |grep -i aes
should probably tell you what you need to know.
Pads are brand new, I had a pro replace them a couple months ago (lazy). It's just this bike positively eats brake cable for breakfast. (Weird, this got mis-threaded in the reply, trying again)
I spent three months in Houston about 10 years ago and I've never experienced such a wild-ass level of passive aggressive probing to see if I was in their particular in-group anywhere else. I'm from the Midwest and used to some of that but it was every fucking conversation, down to getting asked what church I attend while trying to get a coffee at a cafe.